


A Story Of Love And Horror

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A Story Of Love And Horror AU!, Angst, Dating, Everything Hurts, M/M, Multiple Universes, You Really Just Have To Read It To Understand, everything is gay, not beta read we die like men, please let steve and bucky be together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 16:54:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24300163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: I would like to tell you a story. It is a difficult story, and I don't know what it means. But it seems important for me to tell you. It is about two unremarkable people, and the terrible, awful decision they had to make.And now, a story of love and horror.(An AU based on Episodes 121-123 of Welcome To Night Vale)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Sam Wilson (mentioned), James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	1. Redwing

I would like to tell you a story. It is a difficult story, and I don’t know what it means. But it seems important for me to tell you. It is about two unremarkable people and a terrible, awful decision that they had to make. 

James Barnes, known to his friends as Bucky, runs the antique mall. This mall is located in the old part of the tiny town he was born in, the same town he grew up in, the same town he currently lives in, and the town he will most likely die in. This happened to most people. 

Before he did that job, however, Bucky developed an interest in time. As a child, he would stand still and consider that, while he had not moved at all, something had changed. That he had grown just slightly older, his hair just slightly longer, and without ever seeing the movement. He liked to lie in bed and watch the planes pass very high in the sky. He liked to think about where they had taken off, and where they might land. Objects fascinated him, because they too moved through time, but on a different trajectory than him. His bedroom lamp had existed, looking more or less like now since before he was born, and could very well exist long after he was gone. It wasn’t even aware, couldn’t even move, and yet it joined him on the mad hurtle through time. 

Bucky found this terrifying, and he found this fascinating, and he found this delightful, and he wanted it to stop, and he hoped it never stopped. And he felt all of these things at once, without contradiction. What use was there in worrying, if all he felt about time didn’t exactly add up? He was too busy feeling the feelings to worry about them making sense. And so, of course, he became fascinated with antiques.

Steve Rogers teaches art at the high school. This high school is located near the center of the tiny town he was born in, the same town he grew up in, the same town he currently lives in, the town he will most likely die in. This happened to most people. 

Teaching art was almost the entirety of Steve’s life. He thought about art when he woke up, on the drive to work, during art classes, and at night while he ate take-out dinners while watching Bob Ross. This made him happy. What makes a person happy, if it doesn’t harm another person or themselves, is okay even if it is not how anyone else would want to live.

But even though it made him happy, Steve was aware that there was more than one kind of happiness. And that perhaps this happiness he found in a life endlessly thinking about art, was less than the happiness he could find in a life with more in it. This wasn’t about fixing a problem, this was an attempt to improve on a good situation. This was his play for some sort of grace. Other people, he knew, could provide an outside perspective, and perhaps allow him to be less focused on his work. And so he decided he would try dating. Without expectations, without a plan, just as a way to see what the world might have for him.

There was no great epiphany for Bucky that led to his dating life. He had been on a dating app since it had become available for his town and had gone on a few casual dates. It was not an important part of his life, because it didn’t seem likely to ever lead to anything more. But the occasional company was nice. A night with someone, and then back to his life as it was, which was a life he liked. In this way, his dating was related to his obsession with time. His bed was always the same, but sometimes there was another person in it. And mostly, only him. He floated upon that bed as it moved through time. Passengers on and off, and he alone voyaging onward. And then Steve messaged him, and they started chatting.

For his part, Steve was unsure of how to date. It had been some time since he had done it. So he had messaged a number of both women and men in town, who had seemed to him like someone he might want to spend more time with. He did this without expectation. He had few expectations that did not involve art. He just performed the actions that might lead to new outcomes for him, and three people had messaged back. He was, after all, not a bad looking man. Handsome, even, although it had been a long time since anyone had told him that. And so it would not have occurred to him that he was handsome, and this in many ways made him even more handsome.

Bucky and Steve agreed to meet for lunch near the high school. This was close enough to the antique store that Bucky could walk, and so the whole thing didn’t feel to either of them like much of a commitment.

“So,” Steve said, once they had sat down with their food.

“So,” Bucky agreed, and for an awful moment it seemed like it would hang there in uncomfortable silence and a bad date best forgotten.

But then Steve asked him about antiques. And this turned into a discussion of all the many old items that would never be valuable from the viewpoint of capitalism but were more interesting than the valuable ones. From this, the conversation spread out into Bucky’s fascination with time. And then, time itself. And then, their  
childhoods, and how it was hard sometimes to remember that they were adults and, in Steve’s case, older than his parents ever lived to be. 

On returning to work, Steve started the afternoon classes as usual. And as usual, he threw himself into the rhythm of brush strokes and guiding unsteady hands. But he found, for the first time in his life, that he couldn’t make himself fully focus. There was a part of him still thinking about the lunch, about the way Bucky’s hands had looked tapping on the table, about the way he talked about time as if it were not an implacable force, but an old and fallible friend. He had to continually draw himself back into class, and his students wondered if he perhaps was sick.

Bucky stood at the window of his antique shop watching the planes fly overhead. When a person entered the shop, he would acknowledge them vaguely with a nod and then acknowledge them vaguely with a nod again when they left. Otherwise, he kept his eyes on the window. Something in his chest felt tight, but also less heavy. He was both scared and happy, and he wasn’t sure why he was either of those. When later, they both messaged and decided to on a second date, an evening date at a nice restaurant, something with a bit more commitment behind it, neither of them connected it directly to the way they felt after their lunch together. But both of them could not contain their impatience and had messaged that very evening.

There was a second date. And that night, Bucky went back to Steve’s house. Then a third date, when they went back to Bucky’s house. Then a few more dates where they sometimes went to one of their houses, and sometimes just kissed, wild with the feeling of it out in the parking lot of whatever restaurant or bar they had met at, before saying good night because they had to work in the morning. They were adults who sometimes had control of themselves. This was not one of those nights.

This was a night where Bucky was in Steve’s bed, resting on his chest. Steve’s hand, which had been stroking his hair, was still, as Steve had fallen asleep. This was a little over a month after their first date. As he lay, sleepy and happy, he watched the TV, which tinted the darkness a soft flickering blue. It was an old episode of Angel. Bucky had seen this episode many times, but it still felt comforting to watch, like sitting in a room he liked. The episode had become a place he could go to, rather than a story to follow. 

There was a commercial break, which contained a rather annoying commercial for a local mechanic which featured a cartoon spokesbird, Redwing. Bucky was not fond of the commercial, as he was not fond of Sam Wilson, the mechanic who also happened to be his ex-boyfriend. Redwing had been rambling on about car crashes and affordable fixes when he said his name.

His cartoon face turned directly to the screen, and he said, “Bucky.”

He didn’t know how to respond. A commercial had never spoken to him before. He was just starting to think that maybe he had fallen asleep after all when Redwing stepped out of the TV screen in a clumsy flapping movement. He then sat up, a two-dimensional flickering cartoon hawk standing in the bedroom.

This was too real. This wasn’t a dream.

“Bucky,” Redwing said. “You aren’t supposed to be here. This doesn’t belong to you.”

He cocked his animated head, the wall of Steve’s apartment vaguely visible through him, as if through heavy fog. As his head turned, it sagged in the direction of the ground, stretching and distorting his cartoon face until it was a series of drooping ovals. When he spoke again, his voice sounded stretched too.

“You have to make this right, Bucky!” Redwing snapped. “You have to make this right!”

Bucky screamed. Nothing happened. He screamed.


	2. Spire

Bucky did his best to pretend that he had imagined what he had seen that night at Steve’s house. When Redwing, the cartoon spokeshawk for the car repair shop, had come out of the television and told him that he does not belong and that they were both doomed. This obviously wasn’t an easy thing to forget, but people forget difficult things every day. We are, all of us, carrying around difficult things like cannonballs rolling unstable in our heads, occasionally throwing us off balance when they shift too much to one side. But mostly, just slowing us down while we pretend nothing is wrong

He and Steve continued to see each other. He let people know at school, and the faculty and administration were happy for him. Everyone felt that he was always too consumed with high school art classes. Especially Principal Fury, who grumbled to himself that the only reason the tiny town hadn’t completely cut the art program was that everyone liked Steve too much to kick him out. Steve took Bucky to a faculty after school drinks meet-up, the first one he had ever been to.

Bucky, in turn, took him to his monthly book club meet-up. Everyone agreed that Bucky’s relationship was having a real effect on him.

“You hardly seem like the same person,” said Tony, who had liked Bucky before and was jealous that he might change and grow as a person, outside of his influence. Tony was, all in all, being a real shit. Everyone else agreed that he seemed happier and more open to the world than before he had started dating. Bucky quietly wondered if changing so quickly, just because you were eating meals with and sometimes sleeping with someone was a good, bad, or neutral thing. He thought change was hardly ever neutral.

Through all of this, he pretended that Redwing the cartoon hawk did not appear to him most evenings in his home. But he did. He would crawl out of his television, even if he was watching Netflix instead of cable, or if the tv was turned off. The proportions of his body, lovably clumsy in two dimensions, seemed a horrifying mistake of nature in three dimensions. And his features were warped and blurred, as though seen through static.

“You don’t belong together,” Redwing said in a goofy voice that occasionally veered dizzyingly into other pitches, sometimes a child’s giggle or a bassy growl for a few seconds before sliding back to the middle. He would hide under his covers, and he would hear from within the hot dark of the blanket, his familiar cartoon voice.

“There is a price that must be paid!” Redwing would yell, and Bucky would scream, and scream, and then realize that he was alone, and then he would pretend that it could have been a recurring dream, and then he would pretend none of this had happened in the morning.

Honestly, if Redwing had stayed on the television, Bucky would have been much more comfortable with the situation. It’s the kind of thing Sam would probably waste a lot of his time on, but Bucky made the assumption that Sam was not capable of whatever kind of dark magic would be necessary to bring Redwing to life. 

Steve did not see Redwing, but he was not without his own troubles. He would find, some evenings, that when he looked in the mirror, there were two of him, one sitting behind the other. He would stand, and the second reflection would stand too. It would follow all of his movements from behind his primary reflection. This went on for days. Steve wondered if there was something wrong with his mirror. Then one night, he looked in the mirror and there was only one of him. He sighed, feeling some relief to the tension that had been with him so long as to become his new normal. And that was when, in the mirror, his second reflection came into the room, followed by Bucky. 

Steve whipped around. The room he was in was empty. He looked back in the mirror. There was his own face, terrified, and on the bed, there was himself again with Bucky. The two of them were kissing passionately. He watched them kiss, and then his reflection and the Bucky in the mirror stopped kissing and looked up at him with startled faces. They stayed frozen that way, and he stayed frozen too. After several moments, the mirror couple smiled. Their smiles got wider, and wider, and they split through their cheeks, and they were choking on their own blood, and they were both dead. And then, they were alive again, smiling at him. 

He shouted and stumbled back from the mirror. From then on, he took to covering his mirrors and getting more sleep, assuming he had hallucinated the whole thing. That worked for a few days. But one day, he came home to find himself in his bedroom, already sitting in front of the covered mirror. The him that was in his bedroom looked up at the him who had just entered, with wide eyes and a yawning mouth, and Steve, who believed himself to be the real Steve, turned and walked out of his house. He checked into a motel and decided to stay there for a while.

Finally the strain broke on Steve and Bucky. At Applebee’s over lunch, Bucky started crying, and Steve was so surprised that he started crying.

And Bucky said, “This is going to sound crazy-”

And Steve said, “You’re not going to believe me-”

And then they told each other, and it didn’t sound crazy, and he believed him.

“What does it mean?” Bucky asked. “Why are we being punished just because we’re finally seeing someone?”

“That’s a good question,” said Redwing. He was sitting in the booth next to them. Both men yelled in surprise, and the other people in the restaurant looked over with a mix of confusion and annoyance. None of them could see Redwing.

“Who are you?” Steve hissed.

“Me?” asked Redwing, his animation bird face stretching and compressing in mesmerizingly horrifying ways. “I’m a construct! In order to allow communication!”

“Communication with who?” asked Bucky.

“I represent the Brown Stone Spire,” Redwing said.

The Brown Stone Spire was a strange monument at the edge of town. According to local legend, it offered great gifts in exchange for even greater sacrifices. It would reach out to desperate souls to offer the exchange, and it was very dangerous. Children were warned never to do what the Brown Stone Spire asked of them.

“But that’s just a legend!’ Steve argued. Steve liked arguing just about as much as he liked art or Bucky. “The Brown Stone Spire can’t really talk to people, it’s a story.”

“Do I look like a story to you, Steven Grant Rogers?” Redwing asked, and Steve couldn’t argue with the cartoon parrot who somehow knew his full name.

Redwing continued. “Everything’s gone strange since you started dating. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Maybe,” Steve said, thinking of the mirrors in his home.

“Maybe?” repeated Redwing. “Maybe it will get even stranger. Maybe your conditions will continue to deteriorate.”

“What do you mean?” Bucky asked. Bucky had always believed in the legend of the Brown Stone Spire, so he was a lot more open to the idea then Steve was. “What, is the Brown Stone Spire homophobic?”

“No, it is not homophobic,” Redwing said. He was on the other side of the table, next to Bucky now. This town is a point where many universes meet. “There are many different versions of the universe, and in one of them, the two of you are superheroes. To save their universe, they had to create multiple timelines within their universe, which caused a rippling effect across all universes. Several universes collapsed into each other. When the mess was finally sorted out, not everyone ended up in the right universe.”

“It’s me,” Steve gasped. “That explains the other me in my house.”

“No,” Redwing said. “It’s Bucky. He doesn’t belong here. Bucky, you switched places during the collapse with the Bucky of this world, and you are coming into contact with a person from a different universe, which has an exceptionally detrimental effect on reality. I believe you were saying something about reflections in your house?”

Bucky couldn’t believe it. Or he could, but he resolutely chose not to. Steve thought again and again of the other him and the other Bucky, lying dead on his bed and then smiling. It was true that something was horribly wrong. Perhaps they didn't belong together. Perhaps they didn’t belong together so much that the universe itself was collapsing around their relationship. 

It wasn’t fair. Didn’t both of them deserve happiness?

I’ll go ahead and answer that: they did. But what a person receives and what they deserve is only ever tangentially and coincidentally related.

They decided they should go to the Brown Stone Spire. It had offered to help them. They should at least hear what it was asking for in return. Steve drove them.

The Brown Stone Spire stood, tall and foreboding on the edge of town. It, at least, did not grow a face and start talking. 

“Hello?” Steve asked, feeling entirely ridiculous. “Can you help us?”

“We just want to be together,” Bucky said. “I don’t know if we belong together, but we make each other happy. Isn’t that something worthwhile? Don’t we get at least that?”

The Brown Stone Spire heard. It already knew the problem, and it already knew the solution, and it already knew the price. It told them all three by implanting the thoughts directly in their brains, as was its way.

Bucky threw up. Steve wept. There was a solution, but the price was unthinkable, impossible, inhuman. 

They walked back to the car in silence.


	3. James

That evening, they sat in Bucky’s living room and thought about what to do.

“Impossible,” Bucky said.

“Unthinkable,” Steve said.

“Then we agree?”

“Of course we agree. What else is there? We’re not monsters.”

“Right.”

“I want to show you something,” Redwing said. He was inside the TV. “Come here!”

Both of them knew for certain they would refuse, and both of them took a step forward obediently.

“Come into the TV!” Redwing said. Bucky put his hand on the screen and felt nothing. It was a hollow frame. He put his hand through the frame, and Redwing grabbed it and pulled him through the TV screen.

He was in his living room again, except it wasn’t his living room. Steve tumbled in next to him, and Bucky helped him up. They looked around, and then out the front window. Bucky was outside working in a garden. A different Bucky in the garden, being watched by the first Bucky in the living room.

“This is the Bucky from your universe, Steve,” said Redwing, perched by the window. “He ended up in this universe, and the Bucky from this universe, that’s you, Bucky, ended up in his. A silly mix up. And all things considered, the two of you live in similar enough universes that you may never have noticed it. But these things do need to be set right, or else both of you will slip further and further into the gap between universes until neither of you exists!”

Bucky couldn’t take his eyes off of the man in the garden.

“That’s enough!’ said Redwing, grabbing them and pulling them upward. They were all back in Bucky’s living room, the first living room. There was only one Bucky in this living room.

“You know the price,” said Redwing, as he fluttered back into the television. “There are only two ways forward. The first is that this Bucky returns to his correct universe, and you two never see each other again. The other would allow the two of you to live long and happily together, but in order to do that, the Brown Stone Spire will destroy the other universe and every person who lives in it. That Bucky and Steve and every other person in that world will cease to exist, but the two of you would be together. You don’t have long to decide.”

There are times, as humans, it feels like we are given more responsibility than we can handle. It feels as though the world is resting on our backs, and any decision we make could have implications for everyone else in the entire world. That is, of course, not true. But it was exactly the situation Bucky and Steve found themselves in. There was no path forward for their love that did not end in horror. There was no path forward without horror that did not end their love.

“It’s clear what we have to do,” said Steve, sadly. “No two people are worth so many lives. We must go our separate ways.”

“It’s clear to you because you have no other options,” Bucky snapped. “You’re from this world. You could find someone else to love.”

“I won’t,” tried Steve.

“You will find someone else,” Bucky said. “And me? I have to live alone forever or risk my own existence and the existence of everyone in my life. Can I even have close friendships? Would those cause unravelings? I’d be too afraid to risk it.”

Steve shook his head. “So what are you saying? That we should murder a universe of living beings?”

“I’m saying that I love you, and I’d like to proceed from there.”

After this argument, they didn’t talk or see each other for a few days. Both of them felt completely overwhelmed by the weight of the decision. Both of them pretended they had decided.

During the days apart, Bucky and Steve were not alone. They were not alone first in the mundane and expected ways. Steve still had his classes, and Bucky had his customers, though they didn’t feel like his customers because this wasn’t really his store. But they were also not alone in more malevolent ways. Every night, Redwing visited each of them. He followed Bucky around his home, saying his name over and over in a soft, almost calming way until it lulled him to sleep. He was much less gentle with Steve. With Steve, he screamed. No words, merely high pitched screeching for hours on end.

Steve and Bucky made the night as romantic as they could.

“It’s not too late,” Bucky said. “We could still be together.”

This did not help the mood.

“We couldn’t,” Steve said firmly. “What would we become if we caused so much pain just for our own petty happiness?”

“Is that what this is? Petty?”

“No! It’s just… what isn’t petty against the span of everything?”

“You aren’t. Not to me.”

But Steve could not be persuaded. Bucky gave up and instead, he kissed him. Steve had never felt such a kiss, because he had never before kissed anyone out of quiet and desperate grief. I don’t recommend the context to any of my readers, but it does make for one hell of a kiss. Then, he left Steve’s house.

Steve sat all night with the decision they had made. It was the correct decision, he told himself. But if that were true, then why did he feel as though he would never take another free breath of air. He sat in silence for a long time before walking down to his car and pulling it out of the garage. It was almost morning.

This wasn’t his decision to make. He had already made the decision.

“Brown Stone Spire,” he said, approaching the monument. “I’ve made my choice. Destroy the other universe. I have to be with him, no matter what.”

The Brown Stone Spire did not reply.

“Please!” Steve fell to his knees, hitting the ground again and again until his hands stung. “I’ve decided, destroy the other universe!”

A deep voice rumbled inside of his brain. “It is done.”

Steve Rogers, murderer of billions, walked towards his car.

At first, he walked with shame. But what use, after all, was shame? He had done what he had done so that he and Bucky could live together in happiness. It would be all a waste if Steve ruined it by feeling guilty. He set aside the choice as a matter of the past and started to feel the first spark of joy in his heart. For the last few weeks, he had felt a strangeness, and now the feeling was gone. He felt human again. 

He started the car, and drove directly to Bucky’s house. He couldn’t wait to see him. He had never felt such a complete hunger for another person, but no one in all of history may have ever paid such a price for another person.

And there was that person before him, tending to his garden in the cool morning sun. He did not think about a universe and everyone in it, including another version of Bucky. He thought about this Bucky. He stepped out of the car and approached him.

Bucky looked up at him with a smile. “Hiya.”

“I did it,” Steve said. He realized he was crying, but also smiling. “I went to the Brown Stone Spire, and I did it.”

Bucky frowned, standing and taking a step back. “You did what?”

“What do you mean?” Steve said. “I made the choice, Bucky, you were right!”

“Woah,” Bucky said. “Firstly, no one calls me Bucky but my parents. My name is James. I think you have me confused with the other James, or Bucky I guess you called him.”

“What?” Steve did not understand what was going on. 

“He told me that he asked the Brown Stone Spire to take him back to his universe, where I was stuck. He said we got mixed up, and he showed me how to come back to my world. He said at least we’d have a chance at happiness this way. He also said he hoped you were as nice in his world as you are in ours.”

“He went back,” Steve said. Not a question, but a surrender. “To his world. To his universe?”

“Yes,” said a man who Steve did not know who looked just like his Bucky. “Now, I’m sorry, but I do want to get back to my gardening.

Steve returned to his car, but he had nowhere he wanted to go. He watched this James, who was not Bucky, but he glared at him, so Steve drove aimlessly and stopped again. His Bucky was gone, along with his entire universe. Before he was aware of it, he was already shouting.

“Let me reverse it!” he shouted. “Take it back!”

“There is no taking it back,” said Redwing from the passenger's seat. “But I will make you a one time offer. If you like, I will let you join him in oblivion. It is not mere death, it is an absolute ceasing of existence. Do you want this?”

Steve looked into Redwing’s dark, cartoon eyes. He looked, and looked, and looked.

Two weeks later, he returned to school/ He went back to art classes, redoubled his dedication. A complete focus on art may not be much of a life to many folks, but it is a life. There are many different kinds of life, and most of them are nothing special at all.

James, a different man quite literally from the one we started this story with, continued to run the antiques mall. What delighted him most was how objects existed here in the moment, that everything exists all at once, right now. He loved the present. He thought little about time.

Outside his window, a plane passed overhead. No one watched its passing.


End file.
